April 2005 Blog Posts

This always seems to pop as well. To determine what objects are dependant on what you can use sp_depends. Unfortunately that's for 1 level of relationships in either direction (to the parent or the child). Also, and I don't know why they write them this way, but trying to automate some things using system stored procedures are a pain. Especially when they return multiple result sets, or when the result have different number of columns. At the bottom of this post is a rewrite of sp_depends that the script uses. This script then builds a table of all the relationships...

Well there isn't one. If you read this post and your platform is SQL Server or Oracle, I hope you feel very fortunate that you have
TRUNCATE TABLE <tablename>.
It appears that in version 8, there is a callable procedure that is supplied by IBM, but it cannot be executed as a standard SQL command. It probably not ANSI anyway. In any event, the way of the world to do this in the past, to not incur heavy logging of a DELETE, was to use the DB2 Load utility and do a LOAD REPLACE. This has the affect of marking...

bcp fails to import data near reserved word.
[Doooh]Alrighty then. Thanks Tara (again) for pointing out the obvious. The resolution to this problem is the -q option. As BOL states, it sets quoted identifiers on in the context of the bcp thread. So that solves that problem, and I'm sure it's one that I won't forget. It's curious why there isn't a problem with the bcp out though.[/Doooh]
BOL
-q
Executes the SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIERS ON statement in the connection between the bcp utility and an instance of SQL Server. Use this option to specify a database, owner, table, or view name that contains a...

This pops up every so often, as it does Here. The post title is the DB2 syntax for achieving a unique index that allows for nulls. I always felt that since Nulls are not equal to anything, not even themselves, then how could you get a dup key violation. To be fair, even in DB2 you can not have a primary key that allows more than 1 Null. But you can create a unique index in lieu of the the PK that will allow nulls. This allows the ability to build non-identifying relationships, something I believe is lacking in SQL Server. ...